Very unexpected as it turns out to be, Mozilla and Samsung today announced a partnership in building the next generation browser engine Servo, which they claim will try to take the “advantage of tomorrow’s faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures”. The idea is to build the browser engine from bottom up keeping in view the recent developments.
And unlike the Gecko engine that is currently being used by all of Mozilla’s browser instances, which uses C++, Servo will use Rust language. Rust is an experimental language that is being developed by the Mozilla Research. It is known to be very similar to that of C and C++ in usage and syntax but is much secure and efficient in handling memory and pointer calls. Mozilla, which released v0.6 of the experimental Rust framework today, plans to put up its stable version sometime this year.
What still puzzles me is why Samsung partnered with Mozilla? So far Samsung has helped Mozilla to port the Rust framework to ARM devices. Well, actually the plan is to build Servo that runs on ARM and Android platforms (for now). Mozilla, from the perspective of a browser maker has its clear advantages. But, Samsung on the other hand, can either be looking to tell the world how hardware competent it can be (Now that Google I/O is nearing with news that Google might reveal its next Nexus devices from Motorola). Or might as well try to be independent moving away from the pangs of Google (Note that Google and Apple, both use Webkit as their browser rendering engines).
Servo engine is surely not going to stick only with Samsung, of course because Mozilla promotes open source and as always, Servo’s code is put for everyone to view, edit, modify and contribute to. So, we’re thinking it as a move by Samsung to tell the world that it can act independent. Servo is far away from being put to use commercially. This might put Mozilla back in competition or might turn the entire exercise futile as well. All that we need to do is to sit and watch what the duo do.